Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday April 21, 2011 @06:22PM
from the take-one-guess-which-district dept.

blair1q writes "CNet reports that Google has lost the lawsuit brought by Bedrock, for infringing on Patent 5,893,120, 'Methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data,' and has exposed the Linux kernel, in which the infringing code reportedly appears, to liability for patent-license fees. Red Hat also participated in the suit, arguing that the patent was invalid, but the court decided otherwise."

Meanwhile, it's not unusual that a patent-enforcement company recently set up in East Texas would file suit there this week against ten Internet-based and software companies. Nor is it unusual that Texas corporate records show the company is owned by an erstwhile big-firm lawyer, in this case David Garrod, formerly of Goodwin Procter.

> Posted by kdawson on Friday July 24 2009, @09:14AM> from the patently-absurd dept.> An anonymous reader writes "In a sign that patent trolls are getting desperate to keep their cases in East Texas — long known as the friendliest venue for their claims — some have taken to suing tiny, no-name companies that are run by East Texas residents. The hope is that, if at least one defendant is located in East Texas, the judge will keep the entire case there. Nate Neel, a Longview, Texas resident with a small open source software company called CitiWare, was sued by Bedrock Computer Technologies in June despite (he claims) having no customers or other meaningful operations of any kind. In response, Mr. Neel has posted a strongly worded letter to Bedrock's attorneys on his Web site. It will be interesting to see how East Texas judges respond to this abuse of process perpetrated against their own residents."

http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=bedrock

BTW: the F/OSS company, CitiWare, is no longer in business. Sued of existence?

Although I don't trust Florian Mueller any further than I can spit, I think it may be informative to read his blog post on the subject. Florian does provide court records, and good description of the patent in question.

If only Florian didn't spin everything to his own personal vendetta... I might actually read his articles.

But he ducks and weaves and picks out all the wrong facts to focus on... And gets it entirely wrong.

As far as the linux kernel goes? They've picked a very specific release train. 2.4.22, which came out in 25-Aug-2003 .

So, there's really nothing prior to that which offends the patent? Given the generic elevator/tree description of the patent, i find it very hard to believe.

I also note that they don't call out what code actually offends, so there's no way to track down when it specifically came into being -but of course, that's useful when you don't want to call attention to the fact that the code has been in place longer than the patent has been around....

As far as the linux kernel goes? They've picked a very specific release train. 2.4.22, which came out in 25-Aug-2003.

No. RTFA:

The accused infringement relates to the Linux kernel itself, which is at the core of Google's server farm. The complaint named a long list of allegedly infringing Linux versions, starting with the 2.4.22.x tree all the way to version "2.6.31.x, or versions beyond 2.6.31.x."

As far as the linux kernel goes? They've picked a very specific release train. 2.4.22, which came out in 25-Aug-2003.

No. RTFA:

The accused infringement relates to the Linux kernel itself, which is at the core of Google's server farm. The complaint named a long list of allegedly infringing Linux versions, starting with the 2.4.22.x tree all the way to version "2.6.31.x, or versions beyond 2.6.31.x."

The start kernel is a very specific release because they had no reason to start there. 2.4.x was from a time when there were no new features added to kernels so the code was likely there for 2.4.1 (30 jan 2001) and assuming the 2.4.x series kernel was the first kernel with the feature it would have been added somewhere in the 2.3.x experimental series (May 1999 - May 2000). The fun question is now: did the 2.2.x series kernel infringe?

Ask John Carmack about that and he'll tell you about having to settle over a patent on "Carmack's Reverse" taken out by Creative Labs some time after he wrote it.With software patents you can't win even if the technique is named after you before somebody else files the patent.

Knuth told us and the patent office how bad it would get with software patents in 1994.

It came to Creative Labs via a presentation to a Creative Labs developer forum by Nvidia's Sim Dietrich.Several people knew about it months before Creative Labs heard about it and started on the paperwork let alone filed the patent.Creative Labs also agreed to let Carmack use his proir implementation royalty free.Software patents are an insane innovation designed to make a few quick dollars for the public purse but instead are a burden on the legal system and a brake on the economy. In bad SF some foreign

This is a federal case, so it could potentially get appealed all of the way to the Supreme Court (and Google has sufficient funds to do so).

And they will probably go the distance with it in a manner like Bilski was ran- this is the camel's nose in the tent and it's not like it's really valid on several different fronts. (Based on what I'm about to mention, it might be that this is the plan on this...I can't say...)

Besides, there's some very likely prior art. The initial release of NLANR Squid (v. 1.0) was on July of 1996. When it was released, some six months before the Bedrock patent was filed, it was the inheritor of the Harvest HTTP Cache research project's code and resources, which a reduction to practice places it at about a year and a half prior to the Bedrock filing. At it's core, there is the very implementation of what is described in Bedrock's patent as it uses a hash with external chaining and expiry on the fly- it's how the whole thing does fast lookup and aging on the contents in the cache to begin with. It's how it works so "nicely" and what made it special back when it was implemented.

it describes a specific implementation of a hashtable (linked list for collision resolution, as opposed to e.g. moving the colliding item into the next bucket) with some extra features (automatic removal of 'expired' items during other operations).
I still would not be at all surprised to find prior art.

I wouldn't either. Hash tables with linked lists are in my undergrad notes from 1977. It's in every curriculum, I'm sure.

Oh, yes, the patent also involves garbage collection on the fly. That reminds me, Hans Koomen and I did a implementation of Interlisp right around then too. It had that. I forget where we picked up the algorithm, it was so long ago, but I remember thinking how great it was that the principles had already been developed by the time we needed them.

Those were the days when people were still using rotary-dial telephones, mind you. The patent in question was granted on April 6, 1999.

To summarize: according to the claim, this patent combines two known techniques in what I would regard as an obvious manner. The patent only covers garbage collection on a particular type of data object. Back in the seventies the existing art was already sufficient for managing all data objects.

I believe that chaining hash tables is somewhere in Knuth. Which means that it came out before 1980. Yes, on page 507 of volume 3 he talks about "search methods commonly known as hashing or scatter search", so these were COMMON in 1973. And he talks about ways of refining, and how the keys need to be adapted when the contents of the table changes if you want to retain uniqueness (which he doesn't consider worth the effort), He goes on for a number of pages. But please remember that this was not original research on his part. He was merely reporting on commonly used techniques and analyzing them. And he often didn't go into details. He only had so much space. (And he was recoding everything to work in MIX, which made I/O especially problematic.) But Corman was FAR from being the first word on Hash Table implementations. (In college, sometime in the 1970's, we talked about chaining hash tables and various implementations. Given the limitations on storage [RAM & punch cards...not disk or tape] you can bet we spent a lot of time making sure dead data didn't continue taking up space...though we didn't always properly clear it, merely deallocated it.)

So the "patent", by this "Doctrine of Equivalents" and "After-invented technology" would be considered a mere refinement of standard approaches. If the judge and jury are idiots, or possibly just not interested in justice, one can hope that some appeals court will notice this. (And hope that Google already has it in the court records, because otherwise the appeals courts won't be allowed to notice it.)

But the existence of that patent is further evidence that the patent system needs to be totally scrapped, and all extant patents be considered invalid, because of the malfeasance of the USPTO. I don't think it possible that mere misfeasance could lead to the current mess, though I suppose that there are some other felonies that would also be applicable. Fraud comes to mind. Possibly accepting bribes, though that would need to be proven, as it's not directly shown by the evidence to hand. But "improperly performing their duties in a way calculated to unjustly benefit some parties and unjustly injure others" seems like a good characterization. It might, however, be difficult to prove that they intended the injustice.

All in all, I don't think filing appropriate criminal charges against the offfice-holders at the USPTO would be very successful, however justified it might be. Much better would be to just declare the entire mess corrupt and revoke all existing patents and patent rulings (on, e.g., what can be patented). And then re-write the law into something that can actually be honestly applied.

At that, patent law probably isn't as bad as copyright law. Patents still expire. They may not reveal anything useful, but after they've expired they form a valid basis for claiming that some new patent is invalid. So they do have some good features. Copyrights, however, essentially never expire. And they are allowed to be used to cover items which are protected by a DRM that will definitely render that material "protected" unreadable before the copyright even comes up for renewal. (OTOH, copyrights are granted freely, and without formally filing. But someone else having produced essentially the same work previously isn't protection against a modified idea being copyrighted. In fact, even being in public domain now appears to no longer be protection.)

Have I given the impression that I consider the legal system corrupt? Compared the the legislators it's pure as the driven snow. Then there's the president...

I believe that chaining hash tables is somewhere in Knuth. Which means that it came out before 1980. Yes, on page 507 of volume 3 he talks about "search methods commonly known as hashing or scatter search", so these were COMMON in 1973.

You'd think that one of the 10,000 uber-geniuses at Google would have noticed that and brought it to the attention of their lawyers.

I think the biggest problem with outfits like Google is that they're populated by guys in their 20s and 30s who seem to think that everyone worked with abacuses and vacuum tubes prior to 1990, and little realize the monumental amount of R&D and computing theory done in the 60s and 70s. Guys out of labs at IBM, MIT and Bell pretty much thought up one way or another the vast amount of "new technology" that everyone uses today. Maybe instead of hiring legal guns and relying on the non-existent historical perspective of a lot of coders and software engineers being pumped out today, guys like Google when going against patent trolls should roll out the old guns from that heady era when so many of these algorithms and approaches were developed. That way, when some evil patent attorney declares "My clients invented this in 1996" some old dude from MIT can slap down his thesis from 1968 and say "Fuck you, you lying cunt, me and the boys dreamed that one up over a hash pipe."

I used an 'infringing' data structure in 1997, when I was 16 and a novice C developer playing with a small beowulf cluster.

These structures are so unbelievably common it blows my mind that the prior art did not make the courtroom lynch the plaintiffs. That this was decided in favor of the Bedrock patentwhores (which is a far better term than patent trolls, I feel) has made me a very sad panda.

What are we all working for, when some dickhead hires a lawyer and sues everyone for a 35-year ol

Maybe I'm just a conspiracy nut, but I think it's possible this was a tactical move on Google's part. Of course Google knew about the prior art if random jackasses (myself included) on slashdot can think of it and go look it up. My sincere hope is that they lost this case in order to appeal it, and the appeal will go all the way to the supreme court, and put an end to this madness. Perhaps its a pipe dream, but it's possible.... Right??

The patent was filed in 1997, but databases have used chained linked lists, overflow buckets, and hash tables for long before that to locate (and obviously delete items that were no longer valid) records.

No. It looks like it describes something utterly obvious done to a hash table, though.

Let's say you have a hash table, where you resolve hash collisions by having a linked list of everything that shares that hash value. Whenever you traverse that linked list, whether you're adding another entry, or searching for one of the items on that list, or whatever, since you have to traverse the list anyway, you could examine each entry on the list and possibly throw it away if it's something that you think you'll never use. Like, say, if it's an expired cache entry.

If I'm reading this patent right, that idea patented.

Seriously. And that's outrageous. If stuff this obvious is patentable, then programmers simply have no chance at all. You would have to hire a lawyer to work a week for every hour that a programmer works. It's just bloody fucking insane.

Java has been using chained linked lists in hashtables since 1.2. Adding garbage collection to it isn't exactly difficult or innovative. I'll wager someone did that long before these guys patented it. Maybe not in a standard library, but it's virtually guaranteed that something like this was implemented in software prior to their filing.

This is why the patent system needs, at the very least, a massive overhaul and an abolition on software patents.

I assume that "east district of texas" has somewhere around 10x the usual judges and a very large, busy courthouse and is somehow or other making a great deal of money off all this litigation.

It's a bit like red-light-cameras. Nobody likes them. They aren't serving their publicly declared purpose. But the local government won't give up their cash cow easily. So ya, they're fine with it I'd imagine. Don't expect Texas to do anything about it. But problem is, federal laws regarding jurisdiction allow them to keep doing this. There's federal laws that need to be changed to stope this abuse. There's no point in giving Texas the evil eye, they're just playing the system by the rules and are very happy to see it continue.

I assume this is tongue and cheek, but the Eastern District of Texas (in its entirety) has 10 Federal judges and 10 magistrate judges. In Marshall Texas, where a majority of the "trolls" file, there are three judges. (http://www.txed.uscourts.gov/page1.shtml?location=info)

Notwithstanding the sometimes (frequently?) wacky jury results, an interesting thing is starting to happen though with the Eastern District of Texas: the judges are getting very good at patent cases. The judges are very good at doing "claim construction" and other technical aspects of patent cases. The result is cases tend not to languish because the judge is confused or baffled by the process or technology.

By contrast, there are districts that it is virtually impossible to litigate patent infringement cases because there is NO expertise among the judges.

Except that is this is only one of several such lawsuits, and there may be many more on the way.

PJ, at Groklaw, suspects that Microsoft is behind these lawsuits, and she suspects that there are many more on the way.

If I might remind you, Mike Anderer told us years ago, back in 2004, that this was Microsoft's plan, to see to it that FOSS companies got sued over and over again for patent infringement, until they gave out

I suspect Microsoft may have 50 or more of these lawsuits in the queue.

Depends on whether it gets remanded or not. As it stands, they did prove that it wasn't a valid patent- but the Jury believed "the little guy's attornies" all the same. There's a distinct anti-corporation bent in East Texas and many of the prospective Jurors on these cases aren't as tech savvy as we might be- which is why they do a lot of the Patent Troll litigation there.

Nice bait-and-switch between the judge finding against google on every point in order to only give the jury a narrow decision to make, and then pointing out that "the appellate court judge does not second-guess a jury on matters of fact." Well, as you quoted and explained, the Jury didn't get to decide any of those facts! So the appellate court will be happy to second-guess if the judge acted properly. It's what they do, after all; appeals don't just cat

This one has *got* to find itself appealed, and that appeal will happen well outside of East Texas.

I for one do not see folks like IBM, RH, Intel, Oracle, or other huge companies simply forking over either, even if the "licensing fee" was something ridiculously low. IT would be the camel's nose in the tent, and they know it.

Look on the bright side... Hopefully this will finally get the big companies to realize the current absurdity in the patent system, and push their paid for politicians to reform the system. Their practice of building a war chests of patents does little when you have a someone like this who (like wall street and finance in general) builds nothing and has no productive business function.

On the flip-side, it might encourage big companies to believe that software patents = easy money for no work. They're already doing less than they need to be, the last thing we want is for their shareholders to insist they can make the same profits by doing less.

Big Software is all on the receiving end of this, and all the big players are starting realize that they're shooting themselves in the foot with how broad software patents have become (except maybe Oracle, they seem to be playing their own game. Maybe they think that since they dominate their chosen area they're safer). I believe MS was just in court recently with a similar problem. The mutually assured destruction patent portfolios that everyone built up to protect themselves against each other are useless against the trolls, because the trolls never develop anything to infringe. They just sue other people.

It'll probably still take a few years for the momentum to be redirected and the ship to be turned around, but I think in the next 5-10 year you'll see MS and the other big software players changing their tune on this. Apple and Google never liked the game much to begin with (though they both willing play for the moment), and I don't think it'll take too many more trolls winning cases to convince MS and IBM.

methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data.

information storage and retrieval - nothing new here.using a hashing technique - nothing new herewith external chaining - using what?and on-the-fly removal of expired data - "on-the-fly" is a nice buzzword, but this is also nothing new.

So apparently we can just mix and match random old techniques, and call it innovation and get it patented?

Yep that's exactly what happens when you allow patents on raw ideas rather than specific and detailed implementations. No software patent should be valid without the source code detailing the implementation where simply changing code to work differently completely avoids the patent. Of course if that was the case nearly every software patent would be gone with the exception of things like the RSA patents where changing the code would make it no longer work.

The problem with the patent office is that when they started allowing companies to patent raw ideas in the form of software and business method patents suddenly you could get a patent for an idea with no implementation, make it as vague as possible and then sue everyone. And that's exactly what's been happening and getting more and more common. It's the reason the courts are being overwhelmed with patent suits and it's also the reason the patent office is being swarmed with patent applications. Reinforce the old rule that requires that the patent detail a specific implementation (and in the case of a software patent that means the source code is part of the patent) and much of the problems with the patent system will go away. The side benefit is all but the most important and innovative software inventions are no longer patentable and business method patents go away entirely.

Ah but we can hope the upcoming patent cases before the Supreme reach exactly this conclusion and reverse the nastiness the court created when they essentially allowed business method patents by invalidating previous tests. The only valid patent system is one that deals in specific implementations.

The patent has "source code" accompanied with it. Unfortunately, it's just psuedocode. Source code doesn't get you there- all that happens to be is another language expressing the SAME THING as the patent claims. Both of which, more often than not, express merely a mathematical expression, otherwise known as an Algorithm. In short, there's VERY LITTLE that should be deemed patentable in the space. LZW might've been patentable...if it was on a specific system as part thereof. Not as it was patented,

Well, actually, you have to look at the claims. In this case, however, I'm a bit surprised that nobody could come up with invalidating art. See the Google Patents entry (since Patentstorm sucks ass) and scroll down to read the claims.

A big part of the problem is that there was a huge ton of actual prior art all through the 1970s, 80s and 90s which no one was thinking about for patent purposes at the time and which isn't easily searchable. You have people who can perfectly well remember doing X thing 25 years ago, but almost all the equipment and software from that era is sitting in junk yards or on floppy disks that have long been unreadable due to age, and hardly anybody used to file patents or disclosures for that stuff so the patent

methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data.

information storage and retrieval - nothing new here.
using a hashing technique - nothing new here
with external chaining - using what?

Using a linked list that the hash bucket points to -- hence, external chaining... Yep, nothing new here, standard hash table practice, as opposed to moving the collision to a different unoccupied bucket.

and on-the-fly removal of expired data - "on-the-fly" is a nice buzzword, but this is also nothing new.

I built a connection to player# firewall/database for a simple game server in 1996 (patent filed in 1997). I used a single hash table to store valid open connections and blocked connections. The packed IP address was used as the key (hashed), and an external linked list per hash bucket was used to resolve collisions. If more than one connection mapped to a bucket, it was added to the bucket's external linked list. Each connection (linked list item) had an IP address, port#, validity flag, and time-stamp; The later I used to automatically remove expired connections -- as I traversed the hash table. HOW IS THIS NOT BLOODY OBVIOUS to a professional skilled in the art of hash tables and faced with the problem of expiring bucket entries?! The patent is invalid.

The patent is clearly in violation of my prior art, and doubtlessly many thousands of other's. Fortunately, my source code for that BS game is closed -- no patent troll can figure out the method I'm using and sue me..... The patent (troll) system makes it more beneficial for me to hide innovation -- The opposite of it's intended goal. Linux source code is open, ergo, a broad target for trolls.

So apparently we can just mix and match random old techniques, and call it innovation and get it patented?

Yep. Apparently that's what they did. If someone else hasn't already patented it, you'll get a patent for it, no matter how obvious. The obviousness clause is not actually applied to patents. The patent database is searched for prior art, and applications granted if none is found.

What I find interesting is the "Method ANDApparatus" terms that all these software patents must use in order to link them to hardware and thus make them patentable -- Without the apparatus, they are not patentable.

A patent is public information, the detailed description is required to be published, no doubt in a textual form.

An "infringing" bit of open source software source code is simply a detailed description of a patent. Ergo, source code must not actually be infringing since it is not an apparatus, it is simply performing the same exact task that a patent claim performs -- describing the patented method in detail.

If a translation from the patent claim text to source code text is not an infringement, then a binary representation of such text must also not be an infringement -- A PDF displaying example source code that allegedly infringes a patent dose not itself infringe the patent -- It's just a document / file...

Compiling source code is merely translating it into another binary representation, just like translating a patent claim into example source code is not an infringement, and the PDF translation is not an infringement, a binary executable translation is not an infringement either!

Only when you add the apparatus to the method by running the software should the patent be enforcible. Prior to running the executable code the software is purely a description of the method employed.

A patent suit must not be able force the source code of a "patent infringing" open source project to be taken down -- Otherwise, we must also remove from public view ALL PUBLIC PATENT information.

Combining a chained hash table with a priority queue was obvious 40 years ago. How can something like this be patented? It seems it is time for severe penalties for trying to patent obvious things. Like a few years in prison. These people do way more damage than terrorists ever did.

i agree with GP, something like "fraud against the people" or "attempted fraud against the people" and treated as any other fraudulent act or attempt at a fraudulent act for the dollar amount sued for or demanded in lieu of court proceedings

I think he was referring to patenting the spending of a few years in prison. And it's brilliant. Think about it: there'd be tons of infringers - and these people are already convicted, which means they probably have shitty legal representation. Easy money!

But having a judge who doesn't have a computer science dregree decide a software patent case's validity islikely to result in decisions akin to having a non-physicist judge declare e=mc^2 invalid and illegal becauseit makes everything disagreeably bendy.

It would be awfully convenient if the value of pi is 3, instead of that stupid never ending decimal 3.141592654... So hope they will change it too. May be with retrospective effect so that I could go back to my grade school and have my math grade changed. "Mrs McGuillacady, the answer you marked wrong is correct now. So you owe me a passing grade".

I won't comment on the validity, it seems pretty obvious to combine techniques for accessing/modifying a hashed/linked list with combing a list for items to delete, but there's a trivial work-around for it.
Don't delete items as you comb through them, simply mark them as invalid and put them on a list of records to be recovered. Periodically, or when running low on storage, delete items on the to-be-deleted list. Might even be faster when multi-threaded if the invalidate can be done with a lightweight synchronization rather than locking the record(s) out while recycling them; can even keep a private list of invalidated records, then add that to a global list to be recycled.
Claims 2, 4, 6, 8 are ridiculous on the face of it, though - using dynamic limits for ANYTHING is not novel unless you can show a significant problem that hasn't been solved before. Simply specifying a dynamic value that a routine uses to count the number of iterations of a process, length of time to spend doing something, number of things to do in a pass, etc, is 40 years old at least.

They aren't patenting mixing hashes and linked lists. They have several references to using such data structures (including Knuth).

The "innovation" is to delete expired records while accessing the records, either adding new records or searching for existing ones, plus the additional "innovation" of dynamically configuring the maximum number of records to delete on each access request.

In other words, you look up the hash, go to the first record in a linked list. You check to see if it's expired, if so you

It's not that novel. I'm pretty sure that in in the 20 years that I have been doing software I have done this same thing 3 times at 3 different companies that all pre-date the patent application. It's just the obvious solution for some types of problems. It's to bad that most of us just solve problems and work, because if any one of us had written a little magazine article about this there would be obvious prior art!!

Actually, prior art only refers to prior patents (why wouldn't you have patented it, if you really invented it??) and in any case, the new rule is "first to file", not "first to invent", so prior art will no longer even have zero relevance.

I am very sure no one has file a patent for cooking food with fire. So that is patentable under the, "not first to invent, but first to file" rule?

Actually, prior art only refers to prior patents (why wouldn't you have patented it, if you really invented it??) and in any case, the new rule is "first to file", not "first to invent", so prior art will no longer even have zero relevance.

I am very sure no one has file a patent for cooking food with fire. So that is patentable under the, "not first to invent, but first to file" rule?

Do you wanna place bets on whether or not someone with the proper motivation and a little creative wording could get such a patent through the USPTO?;-)

Really? Back before OO runtimes gave us Vector and Hashtable classes I used to build data structures like this.

Declare an array A of 100 pointers to a struct

Hash each item of data and mod 100 to get an index I into the array

malloc a struct M

Set M->next=&A[I]

Set A[I]=M

Its very fast on write. On read you get the hash, mod by 100 and do a linear search on the linked list. If the lists look like getting too long then increase the size of the array to 1000 or something. Its quick and dirty. I don't think

Because most of the things I end up doing in software don't seem like novel inventions to me so I never think of patents. You do the work and you logically think through the problems and you write the code to solve them. I don't sit around thinking if everything I am coding is patentable. Actually the only patent application I was ever a part of was driven by the business, and by the time the lawyers got done with it they made it so generic that the part I actually thought was clever got lost in the proc

If you can make one that automatically garbage-collects itself while ensuring that the types inserted are correct and array bounds are extended whenever space warrants, then you might have something. (although I'm pretty sure I did that predictive bounds extension thing in about 1987 so watch your step).

Your patent would infringe on my patent for "methods of storing and retrieving information encoded using one or more symbols and arranged in a sequential order, as well as methods for enabling the access of that information out of order."

Don't even think about filing your patent, because I also have a patent for "1) methods and apparatus for generating potential courses of action based on evaluation of potential conceptual possibilities, 2) methods and algorithms for evaluating said conceptual possibilities

The UniVerse database as well as Prime Information were using this type of structure since the late 1980s. UniVerse has a "Dynamic" file that uses hashing to store data with an extended structure to store data that does not fit in the primary block.

Furthermore, when additional space is required, a block restructure is performed, (the database compresses the blocks before requesting additional space i.e. garbage collect).

Red Hat has sued Bedrock to get the patent revoked for numerous reasons. Among others, they point out that Linux, which dates to 1991, predates the 1997 patent; that no one has ever used the patent; and that in any case Bedrock has no claims to the patent

"If I might remind you, Mike Anderer told us years ago, back in 2004, that this was Microsoft's plan, to see to it that FOSS companies got sued over and over again for patent infringement, until they gave out: "In a world where there are $500 million dollar patent infringement lawsuits imposed on OS companies (although this is not completely settled yet), how would somebody like Red Hat compete when 6 months ago they only had $80-$90 million in cash? At that point they could not even afford to settle a fraction of a single judgment without devastating their shareholders. I suspect Microsoft may have 50 or more of these lawsuits in the queue. All of them are not asking for hundreds of millions, but most would be large enough to ruin anything but the largest companies. Red Hat did recently raise several hundred million which certainly gives them more staying power. Ultimately, I do not think any company except a few of the largest companies can offer any reasonable insulation to their customers from these types of judgments. You would need a market cap of more than a couple billion to just survive in the OS space." So that's what he said. And 50 or more lawsuits lined up means using proxies, obviously. Remember Microsoft trying to sell some of its patents that read on Linux, or so they claimed, to patent trolls? OIN played man in the middle on that one, but who is to say that was the only one? That's why it's an antitrust issue, I'd say, using patents like this as an anticompetitive weapon. And if you want to know what is wrong with software patents, the damage they are doing, read the quotations from various business executives (like Andy Grove) in the footnotes to this article.]"

http://groklaw.net/

BTW: the F/OSS company, CitiWare, mentioned in the first slashdot article about Bedrock, is apparently out of business. I wonder if they were sued out of business?

You know it would be a rather interesting thing to take this and run a political game with it. Spin political marketing vilifying software patents as a threat to the existence of iPhones, iPads, etc.. Don't make it technical, don't provide any details, play a pure and simple brainwash campaign like was done with healthcare reform and the "death panels." Target the old people. Tell them that these patents seek to ban medical devices. etc...

Everyone wants to play in the smartphone market. MS is already touting Windows 8 on ARM. And can't even get a foot into the tablet market, because of the Apple and Android players. If Android can't be easily untethered from licensing issues, it will open a big hole for Ballmer & Co. on every front of the future of personal computing.

Apple has much to lose from the advancement of Linux with Google's Droid OS.

A patent like this when validated takes everyone down. Linux, BSD and other open codebases are significantly more visible to these trolls, so they draw fire first - but something as vague as this hits everyone.

Apple has a significant investment in open code that would likely be found in violation of this patent, so why on earth would they try to destroy it? So does Microsoft. And IBM, O